by Robert Ward
“Don’t see how we can do that,” Nelson said. “She’s the one who brung all the trouble down onna neighborhood.”
“You’d better not touch her,” I said.
Nelson looked up at Grace, who stood there staring at us. Then she spoke, coolly and calmly.
“No,” she said. “You go ahead, Nelson Watkins. You do whatever you want to us.”
I swallowed hard. Oh, man, now was not the time to try out our new nonviolent tactics.
“Go ahead,” my grandmother said. “But I’m telling you now that it won’t make any difference. No matter what you do … my grandson and I are committed to civil rights. And to nonviolence.”
“Huh?” Nelson said. “I don’t get it.”
My grandmother smiled and looked at him again.
“Well, would you like to kick me?” she said. “Or would you like to scratch out my eyes?”
Oh, sweet Jesus, I thought …
“Hey, you crazy or what?” Nelson said.
“Maybe you could just jump on me,” Grace said. “You’re big boys, and I’m sure you’d get a kick out of that.”
“Hey, wait a minute, she’s making you look like a chump, Nelson,” Buddy said.
My grandmother turned to Buddy.
“Here I am,” she said. “Go ahead and do whatever you want, Buddy.”
“You think I won’t?” Buddy said. “You think I won’t?”
“No, I’m sure you will, Buddy. Hitting a woman is just the kind of thing you’d be good at. So go right ahead.”
Buddy lifted his fist, and Nelson walked up the steps toward my grandmother.
“We’ll do it,” he said. “We’ll make you wish you’d never been born, you old bag.”
“So go ahead then,” Grace said.
She took off her glasses and stood still as the two of them converged on her.
“You’re making us do it,” Buddy said. “You’re making us hit you.”
“And we’re gonna,” Nelson said.
“Well, get on with it,” my grandmother said. “For bullies, you two are certainly slow at this kind of thing.”
They looked at each other, then down at me.
“What are you gonna do if we hit your grandmother?” Buddy said.
“Me, I’m gonna watch,” I said. “I think it would be real interesting to see what kind of punch you use. Uppercut or right cross.”
Nelson looked at Buddy, and the two of them suddenly seemed mightily confused.
“It’s a trick,” Nelson said. “Gotta be.”
“Maybe old Rob’s home,” Buddy said, looking up at the house.
“Maybe old Rob’s just waiting for us to hit her, and then he’s gonna come out with a shotgun.”
“ ‘Cause one thing I know for sure,” Nelson said. “Grace Ward may believe in nonviolence, but old Rob believes in a good ass whipping.”
I looked at Buddy, and suddenly my tongue got the best of me.
“I don’t need old Rob to kick your ass, Buddy. But today is freebie day. You go right ahead and hit me and my grandmother … and nothing much is gonna happen to you.”
Buddy looked at me, and his eyes kind of crossed.
“Much,” he said. “You hear that? ‘Much’?”
“I heard it,” Nelson said. “You two think we’re gonna fall for that stuff. Know what I bet … I bet they have ten niggers in the house right now, ten niggers and old Rob, waiting to come out and get us.”
“Boo,” my grandmother said.
Both Nelson and Buddy jumped back, as if a firecracker had gone off in front of them.
They began to back away from the porch, heading for their house across the street … looking around behind them as they went, as if afraid that Negroes might be strategically placed behind parked cars.
“You can’t fool us, Grace Ward,” Nelson said.
“Whole house full of niggers,” Buddy Watkins said.
“Plus old Rob,” Nelson said.
“Imagine trying to set us up,” Nelson said. “She thinks we’re idiots or something.”
“Well, it didn’t work,” Buddy said. “ ‘Cause the Watkins brothers ain’t a couple of damned fools.”
They headed up into the house and slammed the door. The last thing I heard was the satisfying click of the deadbolt lock.
I looked up at my grandmother, and both of us burst into laughter.
“Gracie, that was stone beautiful,” I said.
“You’re right,” she said. “It was. Now let’s get a little sleep. We’ve got a demonstration to attend.”
It was more than a little strange to be standing in the Eastgate Shopping Center with fifteen demonstrators and my grandmother outside the very store—the Food Fair—that I shopped in with my parents, the store we discovered the wonders of Mrs. Paul’s Fresh Frozen Fish Sticks. Now as I walked around in a circle holding up my sign, “Negroes Can’t Work Here,” I looked up and saw Grace with her sign as well, “Freedom for All or Freedom for None.” As we all began to sing “We Shall Overcome,” I looked at the store my family and everyone else in our neighborhood had considered the very essence of modernity, and I realized that only the packaging was new. Oh, the place was all polished chrome and neon lighting, but underneath they were the same old American institutions—good for white people only. In that way the Food Fair was very old-fashioned. As old-fashioned as slavery itself, and I felt a great pride in my grandmother and some in myself, too, walking out there … standing up for the rights of our Negro brothers and sisters, but also for something else as well.
Standing up for justice. Standing up for honesty. America’s honesty, and purity of vision. And standing up for my own best self …
For all the bright packaging in the world cannot make up for a bad conscience … which is, I realized, what I had before I acted on my beliefs. And all the moralizing and self-justification in the world doesn’t make you feel as good as doing one simple thing honestly.
The right thing.
Not the TV dinner but the real dinner.
Not the fish stick but the fish.
Not just talk but righteous action. The right action.
And it seemed to me then, just before the paddy wagons came to take us to jail, that things weren’t as deeply complex as I had thought.
Yes, moralists and sophisticates will tell you that all is irony and that modern life is so complex, so deeply confusing that a man or a woman, even given his or her best intentions, can’t really know what’s right.
To that Grace said, “Bunk!” She was tortured by her own past, a past in which she hadn’t acted on her own best instincts.
But now she was through with that, and I wasn’t afraid for her anymore. I understood most of what she had said. If she wanted to interpret things in a religious way, that was fine.
The important thing was that we had done it, we had acted on our beliefs, and I think I knew that day, much more than the day I ran down the hill to whack Buddy, that I was becoming a man.
And as the Baltimore police assisted my grandmother and me into the paddy wagon (the truth is they were decent guys, definitely not Bull Connor, the racist sheriff from Alabama), I felt a tremendous happiness flood my soul. It was a new feeling, the feeling of acting in a righteous way, of overcoming fears and doubts by doing the right thing. Yet as we rode along, singing together, it was a familiar feeling, too, and as we pulled into the parking lot at the city jail, I realized what it was: the old warmth of inclusion … the feeling I’d had in my younger days on Grace’s front porch when I was surrounded by my family, and we’d see the bright lights of Memorial Stadium shining down on us almost like some celestial halo, a feeling that I thought I would never have again because my family was splitting up and my grandmother seemed not to be the woman I thought she was, and I was most definitely not anywhere close to becoming a man.
And yet here in the paddy wagon with complete strangers, most of them Negroes from a very different Baltimore, a very different America, I felt a new ho
me, one that I knew would sustain me as a man, just as the world of my family had sustained me as a child.
The difference, I thought, as the Baltimore police took me inside for fingerprinting, was that this new family was one of my choosing. I no longer had to be protected by it; on the contrary, I had to work to protect it from those who wanted to tear it apart.
My new family was people like Grace, people in all their glorious imperfection, who nonetheless tried to live decently, people who stood up for people less fortunate than themselves, who fought to preserve real art in a world of phony art hustlers, people who battled to keep a true democratic spirit in a world that sometimes seemed to be all about fish sticks and not at all about fish.
And for that I thank Grace, who taught me that staring endlessly into self is a losing game, a deadly game, that the glorification of self above all deadens the very life one needs to nurture a true self. That social protest is not only our right but in this world of sham and willed ignorance and immense bad faith … our responsibility.
All this I learned from Grace and from Cap, too, and from the brave and selfless leaders of the Negro civil rights movement. They were my heroes then, and all these years later they remain my heroes: King, Abernathy, Moses, Rosa Parks … and my old friend Howard, who integrated a basketball court and never said a word about it.
Heroes large and small … bravery with a purpose. Rebels with a cause. Inclusion in this family is one that will feed your soul. As it fed mine. And as it fed Graces, who sang the loudest and most off-key from her jail cell, driving her guards a little mad. They were very happy when we were bailed out the next day.
Dr. Gibson gave us a ride home and told us that the demonstrations would continue at other sights, that pressure would be kept on Eastgate … and that so far it was working. They’d lost about a third of their shoppers at both Food Fair and the Hecht Company, and the owners were close to making a deal.
He let us out and said he’d be in touch soon.
Though her spirits were soaring, Grace suddenly looked very, very tired, and as I waved good-bye to the Reverend Gibson, I turned and helped her up the steps toward her porch.
“You need a good long nap,” I said.
“I’ll get to bed,” she said. “I’ve got some church work to attend to first. You go ahead, honey.”
I could only laugh. When had she ever admitted she was tired?
I had things to do, too. I called home and told my mother where we’d been.
“You been where, hon?” she said. “In jail, Mom,” I said. “With Grace.”
“Oh, my God, hon,” my mother said. “What did you two do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just demonstrated with the NAACP down at Eastgate Shopping Center.”
“With Negroes?” she said.
“That’s pretty much who’s in the NAACP, Mom,” I said. “Well, did they hurt you?”
“Who, the cops?”
“No, the Negroes.”
“No, Mom,” I said. “I was with them. They are trying to fully integrate the Eastgate Shopping Center.”
“My, my,” she said. “What next? … Well, I’d tell your father, but he’s not living here much these days.”
“No?” I said.
“I’m afraid not. It’s kind of lonely here. I wish you’d come home. I miss you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I miss you, too. I’ll be home tomorrow.”
“Good,” my mother said. “We’ll be all right. You can tell me all about the Negroes. I hope your grandmother didn’t have one of her spells in jail.”
“She didn’t,” I said. “I don’t think she’s going to be having them much anymore.”
“Really? How come?”
“It’s a long story, Mom. Maybe I’ll tell it to you someday. Or better yet, maybe Grace will.”
“Good. You coming home tomorrow then?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Gotta go do some schoolwork. Love you, Mom.”
“Me, too, honey. And that’s good, what you did with the Negroes. Somebody ought to cut out the crap and let ‘em live right. You’d think that Baltimore was Germany, the way we treat people sometimes.”
“You got it, Mom,” I said. “See you later.”
I hung up and lay back on my bed, half drifting off But I felt good, satisfied … and brave. Not pumped up, not movie-hero brave … but brave. Solid.
Then I fell into a deep, long sleep.
That would be the end of my tale … of the days I lived with Grace and the things I learned from her … except for one last little curve, the one I will never fully understand.
I almost hesitate to write it because it seems so strange, but in the name of honesty, I think I must.
I slept most of that day, only waking up around dinner to eat some of Grace’s wonderful pea soup. By six o’clock she looked exhausted, and though she complained she had some more church duties to see to, calls to make about some upcoming charity function, she finally let me talk her into going upstairs to “rest for a while.” I knew that once she hit the bed she was going to be out for twelve hours, which was precisely what she needed.
I brought her robe and warm pajamas, and combed her long hair for her, and then tucked her into bed. “Thank you, honey,” she said. “For what?”
“For listening, for understanding … for getting me back out there where I belong.”
“You did it,” I said. ‘Tm very, very proud of you, Gracie. Now please … get some sleep.”
“You’ll wake me in a few hours?”
“Of course.”
I shut her door softly and headed back to my own bedroom, where I turned on the radio, then fell into a deep sleep of my own.
When I awoke I heard a strange but, by now, terrifyingly familiar noise. It sounded like an animal crying.
Oh, God, I thought, she’s not out there again.
I scrambled up, pulling the covers around my shoulders, and looked out the window through the holly tree limbs to the old garage roof.
There on the roof was Grace, sitting on her prayer rug, dressed in her bathrobe and slippers. It was a cold night, and I thought that my worst fears had been realized. That taking part in the demonstration had unlocked her subconscious and she was going to have a rash of spells. Maybe worse then ever.
I started to throw on a sweater, then looked back down at the rooftops again.
I blinked, rubbed my eyes.
What I saw couldn’t be …
Grace was not alone.
There was a young black boy standing over her. The only problem was that his bare feet weren’t exactly touching the garage rooftop. He hovered just above her in the air, his body encircled by the same bright light I’d seen in the hallway that night.
Even from my awkward vantage point I could see his large eyes. And the flaring, delicate nostrils Grace had described. And the head, slightly too large for the thin, sensuous body.
He hovered there above her, seeming to sway gently back and forth with the wind currents.
Then I saw her look up, and tears streamed down her face.
He showed no emotion at all but simply looked intently down at her for what must have been ten seconds.
Then he put out his two long, thin, elegant hands, and Grace slowly, fearfully reached up and took them in her own.
A warm, sweet smile broke across Wingate’s face. Seemingly without effort he pulled my grandmother to her feet and gave her a ghostly embrace.
It seemed as though he was whispering something into her ear.
And suddenly, on the very edge of the roof, she collapsed, and he was gone.
I pulled myself up to the rooftop and ran breathlessly to Grace’s side.
I turned her over. She seemed not to be breathing.
Heart attack, I thought. Oh, God …
I began to beat on her chest. I hit her twice with my fist, hard, and I was crying out.
“Don’t die. You can’t … no!”
Grace’s eyes popped open.
&
nbsp; “What are you doing, dear?” she said.
“I’m saving your life,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s good of you. But I think I’m okay.”
I helped her up, and she looked at me. The moon shone down on us like a spotlight.
“He was here,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I saw him.”
She nodded.
“Well, thank God for that. I’ve been seeing him for thirty years. And believe me, most of the time he was not in a loving mood.”
“No,” I said. “It can’t be.”
“Yes, it is, honey. But tonight … tonight Wingate was different.” She was shivering, but she didn’t want to leave yet, so I hugged her tightly.
“He held me, then he whispered something in my ear.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Grace, I forgive you.’ Then he kissed me on the ear, and I guess I fainted.”
I held her very close to me.
“I think we’d better go in,” I said. “You’re cold.”
“Maybe,” Grace said, “but I’ve never felt so warm in my life.”
Together we made our way down the old rock to the back alley, and walked back by the holly tree to the house.
Grace went in first. I was about to join her when I felt something odd … as if someone’s eyes were trained on my back.
I turned quickly and saw him there, standing just above the garage. He looked at me with a depth of sadness and understanding that tore at my heart. I stared back at him, and I felt his intensity, his passion filling my own heart. That, and sorrow. I felt that it was a sorrow for much more than his own shortened life. Indeed, he seemed to feel and embody the sorrow for all of us, for what we’d become, and how far we had to go.
I looked into those soulful eyes for some hint of the great mystery we all share, until I couldn’t stand it any longer.
Then I looked down at the ground, just for a second … and when I gazed up at him again, he gave me a small, rueful smile and gallantly tipped his old straw hat. I waved shyly back to him.
Then he rose from the garage, straight up toward the moon, and in a flash of light he was gone.
I stayed out there in my grandmother’s backyard, staring up at the sky, for quite a while. The stars seemed brighter that night, and the moon glowed pure, as if all of heaven’s light was intensified by his presence.
